Killer Mousse

by Melinda Wells

  “Oh, no. I thought you were coming at one o’clock.”

  “Is this a bad time?”

  I wanted to say: “It’s a terrible time—I’m perspiring, I reek of ammonia, and I’m wearing ratty jeans and an ancient Dodgers’ sweatshirt with a rip under the arm. Go away and come back when you were supposed to be here.” But, remembering how excited Phil Logan was about this interview, I pasted a smile on my face. “No, it’s fine. I was just—never mind. Please, come in.” I opened the door wide and stepped back. “Sorry I’m not dressed for company. I was cleaning the kitchen.”

  “Don’t worry about how you look,” he said. “I like to get to know people as they really are. Stains and all.”

  It hit me. “You came early on purpose, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” He wasn’t embarrassed.

  What an arrogant, insensitive jerk. “Why did you do that?”

  “To provoke an honest emotion. You’re annoyed. Now I can get to know you without slogging through a few hours of BS celebrity manners.”

  “I’m not a celebrity,” I said.

  “You weren’t twenty-four hours ago, but now you’re my kind of celebrity: a murder suspect.”

  I wanted to smack him with my rubber scrubbing gloves, but I kept my temper in check. “I was on the scene when the death occurred,” I said patiently, “but I didn’t even know the woman. It was just my bad luck that somebody chose to use my dessert as a murder weapon.”

  “Technically speaking, your bowl of chocolate whatever was the ‘delivery system’ for the murder weapon, which was peanuts aimed at a victim known to be allergic.”

  “She wasn’t ‘known to be allergic’ by me.”

  He shrugged. “I’m inclined to believe you. You were married to a cop, so you probably know enough not to point the finger of suspicion at yourself.”

  “How did you know about my husband?”

  “Logan gave me your uncensored bio. He’s probably rewritten it by now.” The journalist regarded me with amusement. “You actually admitted you’re forty-seven.”

  I bristled. “What do you mean, ‘admitted’? Forty-seven is an age, not a crime.”

  “For a woman in Hollywood, it’s a crime.”

  “This is Santa Monica. It’s a sanctuary city for women who’ve passed Hollywood’s idiotic ‘sell by’ date.”

  He held up both hands in a mock gesture of surrender. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “Fine.”

  He frowned at me. “I suppose you’ll want to put on different clothes.”

  “Why? You’ve seen me at my worst. It’s too late to make a good impression.”

  “Oh, you’ve impressed me,” he said. “But I want to go visit the scene of the crime, and I’d like to have you walk me through it. You don’t object to going back there, do you?”

  “No. Actually, I was planning to do that later. In looking around, I’m hoping I can remember something that might provide a clue to who killed Mimi.”

  “We’re on the same page. Go change.”

  “‘Go change’? Please don’t talk to me in that peremptory manner.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were one of those sensitive women.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I felt my face flush red with anger.

  He must have seen it, too, because he said quickly, “Look, I’m used to talking in a kind of shorthand. Why don’t we start this part of the conversation over?” He cleared his throat and smiled. “Since we’re going to your studio, would you like to change clothes?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Okay. Friends again?”

  “We’re not enemies,” I said, smiling. “I won’t be long.” But I hesitated, feeling uneasy about allowing this professional snoop a chance to look through my things while I was out of the room…. And then I knew what to do about it.

  “Excuse me, Mr. D’Martino. I’ll be back in just a few seconds.”

  “Call me Nicholas.”

  When I returned moments later, Tuffy was by my side. As I had expected, the journalist had begun studying the framed family photos on my bookshelves. Before he could ask any questions, I said, “I hope you like dogs.”

  “Yes, I do. That’s a fine standard poodle.” The genuine admiration in his voice almost made me warm to him. Almost. “I’m glad you don’t have him shaved in one of those fancy show-dog styles.”

  “This is called a lamb cut, and his name is Tuffy.” I gestured to one of the club chairs. “Make yourself comfortable while I get ready.”

  NDM—I didn’t like him well enough to think of him by his first name—sat. I had Tuff sit down in front of him. “Tuffy’s friendly,” I said. “But I’d better warn you that he does have one little quirk.”

  “What quirk?”

  “While I’m changing, you should stay exactly where you are. If someone moves around a room when I’m not in it, Tuff can get a little…aggressive.”

  That was a lie, but the reporter seemed to believe it. He settled back in the chair.

  “Can I bring you something to drink?” I asked sweetly. “Coffee? A soda? I could whip you up a chocolate mousse.”

  He laughed. “No, thanks.” Looking at Tuffy, he said, “He seems like a friendly guy. Dogs like me.”

  “But he doesn’t know you yet, and he’s very protective of me and his home. You’ll be fine—just as long as you don’t move while I’m gone.” I said that with a smile, but the new look of concern in his eyes when he studied Tuffy was gratifying. This smug man who liked to play games with people deserved to have one directed at him.

  After the world’s quickest shower, I changed into a pair of good black slacks, a pink cotton shirt, and a black twill jacket, and grabbed the bag with my cell phone in it.

  In less than ten minutes I returned to the living room. Nicholas D’Martino and Tuffy were still staring at each other. I was pleased to see that it didn’t look as though either had budged while I’d been gone.

  8

  Parked in front of my house was a dazzling, luxurious, silver sedan, probably foreign. I’d never seen one quite like it. Narrow stripes in red and blue ran lengthwise along the side. NDM unlocked it and opened the passenger door for me.

  “This looks like something James Bond would drive,” I said. I got in and NDM settled himself behind the wheel.

  The red leather interior was so soft to the touch that it was a sensual experience just to sit in it. “The only thing I know about cars is to have the oil changed every three thousand miles. What is this?”

  “A Maserati Quattroporte.”

  I was brought up to be polite and not comment on the price of things, so all I said was, “Ahhh,” but mentally I was figuring that this vehicle must have cost more than our little house had, when Mack and I bought it twenty-two years ago.

  NDM must have guessed what I was thinking, because he said, “I got the car last year when the Feds were selling off confiscated vehicles for pennies on the dollar.” He placed a recorder between us. “Let’s talk while I drive. You don’t mind being recorded, do you?”

  “Of course not. I wish I’d brought a recorder of my own.”

  “To make sure I don’t alter what you say? That’s pretty paranoid.”

  “Being unfairly suspected of murder will do that to a person,” I said.

  NDM took off as though he were competing in the Grand Prix. I watched the speedometer go from zero to fifty in a whoosh.

  I had to admit that he was a skillful driver, but he soared past speed limits as though the posted numbers were only suggestions. Reflexively, I pressed my right foot down onto the floor of the car. That was a ridiculous thing to do. I forced myself to relax and pretend I was on a ride at Disneyland.

  The fact that I didn’t hear a siren or see flashing red and blue lights behind us annoyed the hell out of me. Why wasn’t an officer lurking behind a hedge or in the mouth of an alley to catch this man who deserved a ticket? A few months ago I’d been stopped for goin
g six miles per hour over the speed limit, and I’d had to spend a tedious day in traffic school in order to keep the citation off my license and prevent my car insurance rates from skyrocketing.

  As he zoomed onto the 405 freeway going north to the San Fernando Valley, I kept myself from imagining the Maserati becoming airborne by giving NDM my biographical basics: that I was born in San Francisco, where my two sisters and my mother still live; that my brother is a doctor in the navy, currently stationed in Manila; that I graduated from UCLA; that I taught high school English before opening my cooking school; and that I met my late husband when he was a new police officer who came in response to my 911 call. My little one room and one bath apartment had been broken into, my TV set and camera had been stolen, and I was blubbering about how terrible it was to be robbed. He had stopped writing in his notebook and told me, “You weren’t home at the time, so you weren’t robbed; you were burglarized.” I stopped crying and told him that I didn’t want a lesson in police semantics. Two nights later we started dating.

  “Was it a happy marriage?”

  “Very.” Such warm memories swept over me that for a moment I forgot where I was. NDM’s voice yanked me back to the present.

  “So you two were the couple with the happy marriage.” His tone was sarcastic. “I heard there was one, somewhere.”

  “The rumors were right,” I said. “And there are more of us happy married couples out there. We just don’t advertise.”

  He ignored that. “What do your sisters do for a living? Or are they married?”

  “That question is vaguely insulting,” I said. “Are you implying that women get married so they don’t have to have ‘real’ jobs? Did you have a mother?”

  “Contrary to some opinions about me, yes, I did have a mother—do have. I’m glad to say she’s alive and healthy. She’s a homemaker, and the hardest-working woman I ever met, so my question about your sisters wasn’t meant as a put-down.”

  The way he talked about his mother made me feel a little less hostile toward him. “My sisters—Keely and Jean—are both accountants,” I said. “They work with my mother, who’s also an accountant. I didn’t inherit the ‘numbers’ gene, but it’s nice to have relatives who can do your taxes.”

  “What about your father?”

  “Dad passed away ten years ago. He was a veterinarian.” I thought lovingly of his gentle manner with injured creatures. “We had lots of temporary pets growing up because we all worked at his hospital, in between having paying jobs. Dad didn’t make much money because he couldn’t bring himself to charge people who were down on their luck but had animals that needed treatment.”

  “Father a vet, brother a doctor…Why’d you take up cooking?”

  “Because it’s something I’m good at, and it’s something I love to do. Why’d you become a journalist?”

  “I heard it was a good way to meet women.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, but a lot of them turn out to be felons.”

  He expelled an exaggerated sigh, and I laughed, even though I wasn’t quite sure whether he was joking or serious.

  “Tell me about the plans for your show,” he said. “How did they decide on the time and why did they go live?”

  “What’s that got to do with Mimi Bond’s death?”

  “Maybe nothing, but I won’t have any idea until I know something about how she happened to end up dead in that particular place at that particular time.”

  NDM was an experienced crime reporter. Perhaps I could help myself by following his line of thought.

  I said, “The way Mickey Jordan explained it to me, my show would be aimed at people who go to jobs during the day. That’s why he scheduled it for seven P.M. here in the west, which is ten o’clock in the east. I’m supposed to do one weekly live hour, with taped repeats of that show rebroadcast four times during the week, at different hours of the day.”

  “They tape all the other shows on the Better Living Channel, so why are they sending yours out over the air live?”

  “It’s new, and I’m not famous. Mickey said that doing it live where things could go wrong added an element of excitement for the audience. It was a gimmick that was meant to attract viewers.”

  NDM’s lips curled into a cynical smile. “I think it worked.”

  “I’ve never heard of murder as a publicity stunt,” I said sharply.

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t start a trend. Go on.”

  His cavalier attitude annoyed me, but I suppressed the feeling in order to get through this conversation without losing my temper. I said, “Mickey Jordan told me that if In the Kitchen with Della showed signs of building an audience that he’d want me to do two additional thirty-minute programs a week. Those would be taped, and they’d be repeated several times during the week, too.”

  “It’ll be hard for the audience to avoid you,” NDM said dryly.

  I’d been so intent on answering his questions that I hadn’t noticed when NDM’s flying Maserati left the 405 North and merged onto the 101 South until I saw that he was taking the Tujunga Avenue exit into North Hollywood. With very little decrease in speed, he proceeded over surface streets.

  “When did you find out Mimi Bond was going to be at your show?” NDM asked.

  “Not until I saw her in the audience.” I told him about meeting her for the first time in the dressing room. When he asked the question John had asked—who knew what dishes I was going to make that night—I told him what I had told John: Anyone who looked at the schedule posted in the production office saw the menu.

  “Mimi either checked the show’s rundown, or someone told her what I’d be making. She had to know in advance so she could plan how to ruin the food. And I found out last night that several people at the studio were aware that she intended to be the ‘taster.’ Nobody told me.”

  “Lots of suspects—this is my kind of mystery,” NDM said with satisfaction.

  Abruptly, he swerved the car onto a short gravel driveway at the corner of Chandler Street and Lankershim Boulevard and eased his James Bond car to a stop in front of the gated entrance to the Better Living Channel’s studio. I looked at my watch and saw that we’d made it from my home in Santa Monica to the production facility in North Hollywood—a distance of nineteen miles, through Los Angeles traffic—in nineteen minutes.

  The Better Living Channel building, with its domed roof and lack of windows, resembled an airplane hangar, but it had been a warehouse before being converted into a television studio. It was secured behind a double row of heavy chain-link fencing and a pair of tall wrought iron gates. The fence was so formidable that I half expected to see a high guard tower with a sniper poised to pick off trespassers. A huge billboard hung outside the fence advertising to passing motorists three of the cable network’s shows: Car Guy, All Things Crafty, and That’s Not Junk. The on-air hosts were depicted in amusing caricatures. I liked the drawings, but I didn’t know how the hosts felt about having their most cartoonable features so exaggerated. If In the Kitchen with Della caught on, I might be caricatured on a billboard one day, too. I didn’t think I’d mind it, but on my forty-fifth birthday I didn’t think I’d care anymore how bad my driver’s license photo was. Wrong. I learned that vanity dies hard. Now I wished that Phil Logan’s retoucher could have gotten his hands on that picture.

  NDM stretched his left arm out to press the call button on the gate.

  A man’s gruff voice crackled through the gate microphone. “Who is it?”

  He leaned toward the speaker. “D’Martino from the Chronicle, driving Della Carmichael.”

  “Carmichael? Oh, yeah—the killer chocolate woman,” the voice said. “Okay. Keep right and go around to the back. Park in any space that isn’t marked ‘Reserved.’ The guard will let you in the rear door.”

  We heard the buzz that released the lock, and the big gates swung open.

  I muttered ruefully, “So now I’m the ‘killer chocolate woman.’”

  NDM chuckled.
“Worse nicknames have been pinned on me.”

  I’m not surprised, I thought.

  He followed the guard’s instructions but only up to a point. Instead of parking in a visitor’s space, he pulled up next to the big barn-size double doors at the side entrance to the studio.

  As we got out of the car, one half of the large doors opened and a young man wearing a dark blue security guard uniform and carrying a clipboard emerged to greet us. It was Stan Evans, the guard who had let me into the studio each of the several days when I came to the studio to rehearse for my TV debut. In his late twenties, good-looking in a bland, college yearbook way, Stan had the sinewy build of a long-distance runner and red hair of a shade that fell somewhere between carrot and rust.

  Stan greeted me with a wide smile. “Hey, Ms. Carmichael.”

  “Stan, this is Mr. D’Martino from the Los Angeles Chronicle.” The two men shook hands. “We’d like to look around the studio.”

  “Sure.” Stan extended the clipboard toward me. “Will you two sign in and put the time down?”

  I signed my name first, then handed the clipboard to NDM. He scribbled his name, noted our time of arrival, and handed the clipboard back to Stan.

  “It’s too bad about what happened last night, Ms. Carmichael,” Stan said. “You going to keep doing your show?”

  “I think so. I hope so.”

  “That’s good.” He seemed pleased. “Come on in. Car Guy’s not taping for another half hour. And Mr. Gil—the guy who makes the furniture—he won’t start taping ’til four today. He’s been on jury duty.”

  Stan glanced sideways at NDM, then looked at me. His eyes narrowed and he lowered his voice conspiratorially. “If you don’t mind my asking, Ms. Carmichael, is there something special you came back for today?”

  NDM replied before I could. “We’re going to look around. Is there a problem with that?” He gave the young guard a hard look that dared him to object.

  “Oh, no,” Stan said quickly. “I was just wondering. Most people don’t come here unless they’re working.” He opened the door to the studio and stepped aside for us.